Operational definitions

Answers

Hi, Nicholas and others-

What is it, operational definition? how does it differ from
conceptual definition? Can you think of a good example?

Suppose that I am study of "social support" found in a health related
usenet newsgroups. First I may want to do is to define what I mean
by "social support." I might look up a dictionary to see how "social
support" is defined in a conventional way. Or I might dig up the
social science index (or others) database to see if there are studies
defined such a concept. Based on this kind of ground work, I define,
in my paper, what I mean by "social support." This is the
conceptual definition part.

But, there is another problem. I need to quantify the concept. That
is I need to measure the thing, which is different from
defining it. So, I should eventually develop some sort of method to
record "social support" as my data. This method
is "operationalization." For example, I might elaborate, in my study:
in order to measure such a concept (social support, which I
defined conceptually earilrer), I took out each sentence in message
threads in the newsgroup and quantified it by counting how many
emotional, soothing words were there. I may go further by stating
that emotional and soothing words may
include: 'cheer', 'support', 'help', ..... etc. By making the concept
"measurable", I am pleaing that the readers agree with what I
measure as "social support." This is supposedly done by my objective
efforts. But, it eventually becomes an "inter-subjective" agreement
between the readers and me (the researcher). If anyone does not agree
with what I measure as a truthful effort to capture the meaning
of "social support," there would be no common ground to build
social knowledge. This is a kind of problem which "scientific method"
inherently holds.